In the late
70s, the film medium's intellectual monolith Hollis Frampton announced that the
video frame was "a degenerate ameoboid shape passing for a rectangle to
accomodate cheap programming of late night movies." Never has this fact
been more gloriously indulged than at the Museum of Art and Design's ongoing
three-month celebration of everyone's magnetic tape: VHS. The series traces VHS'
impact on every facet of the movie process from production to distribution,
including workout tapes.

VHS
assumed the throne of consumer videotape formats after defeating competeing
Betamax and VX technologies. Rebecca Cleman, distribution director of Electronic
Arts Intermix and one of the series' co-organizers, stressed that
VHS was "an inferior format, that won over Betamax primarily because it
could boast longer recording times. The poor quality of VHS, of course, makes
it represent decaying technology, which always gets fetishized."

Video continues
to maintain an aesthetic presence within the art world. From pioneers to
contemporary practicioners, qualities associated with the aesthetic of VHS--a
warm, gummy image, static lines and the low quality that comes from infinite
playback--have become standbys of the gallery scene. Tonight, Cleman will
present a lecture entitled Aesthetics of Analog, which will
investigate the qualities of consumer video recording processes. Said Cleman: "It’s
important to think beyond the VHS tape, to understand that this is part of a
system of components – television, VCRs, camcorders – that created a really new
culture (as of the 80s) of home video, that was very different than home movies
(from film) . . . video engenders a participation that folds spectator,
producer, and distributor into one."

In June,
MAD showcased works like Herschell Gordon Lewis' 1967 psychic adventure Something
Weird, the inspiration for Something Weird Video in 1990,
which revivified Lewis' film along with works classics by Doris Wishman ...